Winston&#39;s War: Churchill, 1940-1945

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Aug 15, 2010 20:30:24

A vivid and incisive portrait of Winston Churchill during wartime from acclaimed historian Max Hastings, Winston’s War captures the full range of Churchill’s endlessly fascinating character. At once brilliant and infuriating, self-important and courageous, Hastings’s Churchill comes brashly to life as never before.

Beginning in 1940, when popular demand elevated Churchill to the role of prime minister, and concluding with the end of the war, Hastings shows us Churchill at his most intrepid and essential, when, by sheer force of will, he kept Britain from collapsing in the face of what looked like certain defeat. Later, we see his significance ebb as the United States enters the war and the Soviets turn the tide on the Eastern Front. But Churchill, Hastings reminds us, knew as well as anyone that the war would be dominated by others, and he managed his relationships with the other Allied leaders strategically, so as to maintain Britain’s influence and limit Stalin’s gains.

At the same time, Churchill faced political peril at home, a situation for which he himself was largely to blame. Hastings shows how Churchill nearly squandered the miraculous escape of the British troops at Dunkirk and failed to address fundamental flaws in the British Army. His tactical inaptitude and departmental meddling won him few friends in the military, and by 1942, many were calling for him to cede operational control. Nevertheless, Churchill managed to exude a public confidence that brought the nation through the bitter war.

Hastings rejects the traditional Churchill hagiography while still managing to capture what he calls Churchill’s “appetite for the fray.” Certain to be a classic, Winston’s War is a riveting profile of one of the greatest leaders of the twentieth century.

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±1±: Best Buy A deeply engrossing, and most revealing, account of Churchill during Great Britain's toughest hours and years. Max Hastings has accomplished a brilliant task: painting a full portrait of a complex man, using all the colors of the human palette without favoring one over the other.

For lay Churchillian fossil hunters--eager to crack open that one rock which will reveal the perfectly defined imprint of a long-extinct species of leader, Winston's War is the ideal tool for discovery. In page after page, Hastings gives us Churchill the humanist, the warrior, the worrier, the optimist, the depressed, the badgerer and and the beguiler. But most of all, Hastings reveals as few have before, Churchill's devotion to the Great Britain that once was and, in his vision, could be again, if only his plans were properly attended to by generals and allies whose actions were otherwise limited to the near horizon of self-interest.

The same brush that defines Churchill with such clarity and vibrance does not neglect to flesh out other characters from that era -- Roosevelt and the American chiefs of staff, and Winston's own stable of generals and advisers receive equal amounts of critical paint, and not always in pleasing hues.

Hastings is not all laud and champagne for Churchill; Winston's War gives us a churlish Winnie, a frustrated warfighter, a spoiled child, an unthinking master, a fretful husband, and bitter father. Through Hasting's sharply focused lens of research and discovery, we watch Churchill fall victim to the duplicity of perceived friends--Beaverbrook, for one, with all his smarminess and deceit--and to seek the embrace of the spitting cobra of Stalin in order to save Poland from the fangs of Soviet domination. Just as in a horror movie in which a hapless character is about to turn a corner to face a bloodthirsty monster the audience can already see, Hastings' portrayal of the Churchill/Stalin matchup will have you screaming, "Run, Winston, run!" and yet you will be unable to stop turning the pages, just as history could not be stopped or re-directed.

But for all his foibles and failings--and there were many--the scales of judgment must, if Hastings has it right--and I believe he does--tip easily toward a near reverence for Churchill's place in history. He was not as much a man of his time, as he was the right man for his time. An anachronism from the very start of the war, Churchill nonetheless was able to poke, prod, cajole, inspire, and lead even when so many forces--social, political, and economic--were placed in his path. As Hastings puts it, "He was one of the greatest actors upon the stage of affairs whom the world has ever known ... He was the largest human being ever to occupy his office." on Sale!